Award Date
5-15-2026
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Committee Member
Jarret Keene
Second Committee Member
Katherine Walker
Third Committee Member
Cassidy Holahan
Fourth Committee Member
Tim Gauthier
Number of Pages
61
Abstract
In current scholarship, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (Wicked) is often categorized as young adult horror or a piece of American Gothic. However, these labels fall short when considering the text within a broader lens of narrative structure and affect. It bears similarities in its narrative to other texts centered on carnival or carnival-like spaces (e.g. circuses and theme parks) that invert elements of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. Some of these texts include Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao and R.L. Stine’s One Day at Horrorland. These stories are further linked by distinctive affects elicited by characters’ engagement the inverted carnival space. Thus, to better examine the role of these affects within Wicked, this thesis considers the novel as one placed within the loose subgenre of the “dark carnival,” which is defined at length in Jennifer Cox’s work Illuminating the Dark Carnival. Using this lens, I begin by defining what serves as the Bakhtinian “carnival” and medieval “church” in Wicked. I then analyze the function of resistant acts performed by characters, and how they shape both the structure and progression of a dark carnival narrative. With an emphasis on both grounded physicality and Bradbury’s evocative, intentional language use, the close readings are two-pronged. I begin with an analysis of how both the perceived presence and the physical construction two spaces, the Green Town Library and the Pandemonium Shadow Show, serve to facilitate acts of resistance against the space positioned as the inverted, or “anti-carnival.” I then turn to a reading of platonic interactions between characters—distance, touching, and looking—and how affect is transmitted between bodies that culminates in a force which moves the body to perform an act or acts of resistance. The end of this thesis invites readers to consider: how can resistance itself function as affect?
Keywords
affect; carnivalesque; dark carnival; Mikhail Bakhtin; pragmastylistics; Ray Bradbury
Disciplines
American Literature | American Studies | Arts and Humanities
File Format
File Size
659 KB
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Bintali, Safiyya, "Spatial and Embodied Forms of Resistance in the Dark Carnival of Something Wicked This Way Comes" (2026). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 5507.
https://oasis.library.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations/5507
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/